Andrew Rumbles has been a sales manager with New Zealand book publishers and has also owned two franchised bookstores.
For 3 years now, Andrew has reviewed books for Express Newspaper and Booksellers New Zealand's Book Blog.
Andrew Talks Books is a home for these reviews along with other writing Andrew produces.

Sunday, December 23, 2012

Eminent Outlaws; The Gay Writers Who Changed America

From a broader perspective I have
just completed reading Eminent Outlaws by Christopher Bram.He takes a close look at the last 50 years of
gay writing from America,Tennessee
Williams, Truman Capote, Gore Vidal and James Baldwin all feature heavily in
the 1950s post war period.They were
often friends but also combative competitors.

Their writing was often criticised for being too homosexual or read as
homosexual pretending to be straight.Baldwin suffered under the charge of not writing as a black man when he
wrote a gay story.It is these writers
who along with Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White showed that gay writing
could be good and did not always have to include suffering homosexuals.Straight people had difficult lives and gay
people often lived happy lives.

The
literature produced could be entertaining, informative and for the publishers
even profitable.The details of the plays,
poems, novels and essays produced in the second half of last century is amazing.This could be a book in which to find your
future reading lists.